The Church in Europe

No, that's not an oxymoron. This article from the July 14, 2007 Wall Street Journal tells us that after decades of decline, Christianity seems to be making a modest comeback:

Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was "boring and stupefying." This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia's biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed.

In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe's long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?

Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.

"Sweden is not as secular as we thought," says Christer Sturmark, head of Sweden's Humanist Association, a noisy assembly of nonbelievers to which the Bible-protesting hotel guest belongs.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

The rest of the article suggests that the ending of state establishments of religion might have something to do with it--which is consistent with an emerging view among historians of Colonial America that the dramatic increase in church membership after the Revolution might have been provoked by the disestablishment of the Anglican Church.

As it happens, I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment by Rodney Stark, a sociology professor at the University of Washington: The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Harper San Francisco, 1997). Stark argues that the traditional view--that Constantine's making Christianity the official state religion is what caused the Roman Empire to turn Christian--is backward. He points to data that suggests that Constantine made Christianity the state religion because Christians had become a dominant force within the Roman Empire. Why? Because demographics is destiny.

Stark uses traditional sociological statistical methods and some very clever use of both data from the classical period, and such things as archaeological counts of churches in various Roman cities, to argue that Christianity grew at a rate comparable to the rise of Mormonism in modern America (about 43% per decade). I'm not sure what the reaction of sociologists was to his clever use of data from a period when demographic data in the modern sense really doesn't exist. Did they react with disgust? Or were they impressed that he managed to find anything to work with at all, like Mark Twain's comment about a dog walking on its hind legs? It didn't do it very well, but that it did it at all was rather impressive.

Stark argues that there were several reasons for this dramatic increase, and there's no need to look for any miraculous explanations. In brief (and not doing justice to how Stark uses the data, as well as primary and secondary sources):

1. Early Christians, because they utterly rejected infanticide, abortion, birth control, and non-vaginal intercourse, had extraordinary birth rates--and eventually outreproduced the pagans. (The parallels to today, where conservatives are outreproducing liberals in America, and Muslims are outreproducing non-Muslim Europe--should be obvious.)

• Roman fathers had the right to leave any deformed or weak male child--and any female--in the wild to die. Females were effectively worthless, and as a result, adult males outnumbered adult females by an extraordinary margin.
• Abortion was widespread in the Roman Empire (often at the insistence of the husband or father of the pregnant woman), and frequently led to death or sterility.
• Roman birth control, while not spectacularly effective, did exist.
• The selfishness of pagan society, as well as the widespread use of anal and oral sex--and of male prostitutes--meant that much of the reproductive potential of Roman society was not being used to produce children.

All of these factors meant that Christians were reproducing like rabbits, while the pagan part of the Empire was actually declining in population at the time that Christianity appeared.

2. While it may shock a lot of feminists, Christianity attracted women in very large numbers because of the dramatically higher status that they held relative to both the pagan Romans, and the Jews. One little horrifying example of the difference--and how it played a part in probably increasing Christian birth rates, and the willingness of Christian women to get pregnant: marriages between adult Roman men and little girls (under the age of puberty) were not simply contracted, but consummated--with often significant physical damage to the girls.

By comparison, Christians delayed marriage until about 18. Considering that puberty probably came later in classical times than today (because of nutritional deficiencies), this meant that Christian women were less likely to be damaged by sexual intercourse, and less likely to be traumatized by it as well.

3. Because Christianity gave women a higher status, it attracted them in large numbers--and it would appear that a fair number of pagan Romans became Christians because of their wives.

I haven't finished reading the book, and there's quite a bit there that I haven't summarized. I wouldn't exactly call it a popular read, but for a book with tables of Pearson Products, it's not bad.

Let me emphasize that while I am an historian, I really can't tell you how reliable Stark's history or sociological analysis is. I don't see anything obviously wrong, but this is way outside my period. As my Ancient Middle East professor once put it, "Everything after the fall of Rome to me is current events."

UPDATE: A reader points me to this article about how Roman use of a relatively rare plant as an abortifacient (a drug that induces abortion) eventually drove the plant into extinction! And just because it's "natural" doesn't make it safe. When I lived in the Bay Area, Marin County's hopelessly New Age crowd was using a variety of similar drugs as "natural" ways to induce abortions--with occasional deaths and often quite severe health consequences.